As a small tribute to the irreplaceable Michael Foot, who died today at the age of 96, here is my review of Kenneth Morgan's 2007 biography of Foot, originally published in Public Service Magazine.
Michael Foot: A Life
by Kenneth O Morgan
HarperPress, hardback, £25, ISBN 978-0-00717-826-1
Michael Foot occupies two places in our popular memory: as the treasured eccentric waving his stick in argument outside bookshops on the Charing Cross Road, and as the archetype of reviled Old Labour, of all that was supposed to have been swept away by Tony Blair since 1994.
Kenneth Morgan’s sparkling biography, Michael Foot: A Life, rescues the grand old man of socialist letters from both these fates. It shows Foot as a dynamic force on the left for most of the 20th century: the scourge of appeasement in the 1930s and the essential link between the worlds of George Lansbury, Aneurin Bevan and Gordon Brown. If Foot was not exactly an early pioneer of New Labour, many of his themes - the primacy of parliamentary democracy, and the need for international co-operation and disarmament - to name but three – seem more vital than ever.
For Morgan, Foot is more potent as a man of ideas than a man of power. His politics were a complex “amalgam of socialism, patriotism and anti-militarism”. As a doyen of CND, he was also a “fierce patriot” who denounced appeasement when no one else dared. Foot was no pacifist – how could he be as the author of Guilty Men, the best-selling wartime tract against Chamberlain et al? He was no crypto-Communist either – his thinking was “unencumbered by the rigidities of Marxism” (unlike many of his later opponents on the Labour right and one or two notable Blairites) and he joined Orwell in bitterly opposing Soviet policy in Eastern Europe after the war.
Instead of Marx, Foot’s heroes were old-school radicals and romantics like William Hazlitt, Byron, Jonathan Swift and Montaigne. His socialism was “evolutionary, and [grew] out of a sense of historical identity…and the radical Liberalism of his youth”, and his “true historical habitat” was the French Enlightenment, with its ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité. The young Labour candidate Tony Blair recognised this in a gushing fan letter to Foot in 1983 (which the book reproduces). In it Blair complains that the liberal tradition on the left is "'scorned or analysed only in terms of its influence on Marx'". In Foot’s book, Debts of Honour, Blair found "'a treasure trove of ideas that I never knew existed'", and in Foot’s politics, "'hope and vigour and something irrepressibly optimistic that struck a deep chord in me'".
Foot was for long periods “an agitator of protest, not a politician of power”. He also, as Roy Hattersley complained, spent too long in the shadow of his political heroes – Aneurin Bevan in particular – to fully develop his own political programme. But when he finally entered government in 1974 as employment secretary, aged 60, he was to prove an effective and surprisingly loyal minister and a scintillating speaker from the front bench. Foot’s first ministerial speech was so unexpectedly brilliant that the bemused Tories withdrew their motion of censure and even The Sunday Times hailed him as “the superstar of the Government” (the same paper was later, under Andrew Neil, baselessly to accuse Foot of being a Soviet spy).
But Foot will always be associated with the disastrous 1983 election campaign and his relentlessly unhappy three years as Labour leader. Not much of this was Foot’s fault and it was to his credit that he held the party together and saw off the divisive challenge of the Bennites, whose vision of an "extra-parliamentary" route to socialism were so at odds with his own.
Morgan’s biography shows that as both a writer and a “distinctive, perhaps unique” politician, Foot’s real value lies in something else: at 94, he has become what the French call a lieu de mémoire – a repository of public memory and a custodian of traditions and values in political life that are slipping away, but which we have fortunately not yet quite lost forever.
© 2007 Craig Ryan
